Restructuring a global business for regional growth and cost efficiency

A multinational entertainment organisation was transitioning from a global operating model to a strategy centred on market-leading regional brands, supported by common platforms. A core part of this transformation was the separation of one of its largest global businesses, which employed approximately 2,500 people and had historically operated as a centralised, global organisation.

The programme was driven by two primary strategic priorities:

1. Transitioning from a global brand to regionally embedded businesses – enabling closer alignment to local market dynamics and improving commercial performance
2. Cost optimisation and structural simplification – reducing duplication inherent in the global model and aligning resources to regional platforms. Delivering this required a fundamental redesign of the operating model, including:

• Decommissioning centralised global teams
• Absorbing capabilities into existing regional structures
• Establishing new teams to address capability gaps
• Transitioning employees across multiple entities and jurisdictions
• Managing a significant people impact, including role changes and exits

At the point that Berkeley Partnership joined the programme, organisation design activity was already underway across several functions. However:

• Future-state structures were being developed in silos, without consistent design principles or alignment to an overarching target operating model
• Cross-functional dependencies were not fully understood or actively managed
• There was limited visibility of aggregate impact (e.g. headcount, cost, spans and layers) across the organisation
• Leadership reporting relied on manual, fragmented consolidation, reducing pace and confidence in decision-making

Bringing structural discipline and financial alignment to the programme

Berkeley was engaged to manage the end-to-end people transformation spanning organisation design, people mapping and consultation preparation.

They needed to introduce and maintain a clear design framework aligned to cost effectiveness, location strategy objectives and design principles. This included reducing unnecessary layers, improving spans of control, and clarifying accountability across functions.

To embed this discipline and create a single source of truth for organisation design, Berkeley:

• Centralised and governed organisation design across functions, ensuring consistency and comparability of structures
• Established continuous alignment with Finance, linking every structural decision to cost implications and tracking against targets
• Partnered closely with HR to ensure alignment on role design, levelling, and job architecture, enabling downstream implementation

Orgvue supported this approach by providing a controlled modelling environment, in which structural decisions could be aligned to financial targets and agreed principles throughout the process.

Building the foundation, and designing the to-be structure

Before future-state design could progress coherently, Berkeley needed a validated view of the current organisation.

Data was extracted from Workday and merged with finance data within Orgvue to create a complete structural and cost picture. The dataset required cleaning and validation before it could be relied upon. Once confirmed, it became the baseline against which all structural changes were assessed.

With this foundation in place, Berkeley and functional leaders used Orgvue to design the future-state organisation. This included restructuring teams and reporting lines, creating new capabilities where required, assigning grades and locations to roles, and analysing spans of control and organisational layers.

Because cost information was embedded directly into the structure, changes immediately reflected financial impact. This allowed structural redesign, cost optimisation and principle alignment to happen simultaneously rather than sequentially.

As a result, design decisions were grounded in validated data, financial reality and agreed standards throughout the programme.

From isolated design to collaborative decision-making and structured governance

Moving design into a shared environment changed how structural decisions were made.

Instead of iterating structures offline and presenting static outputs, Berkeley facilitated live design work within Orgvue, enabling real-time collaboration and decision-making. Reporting lines were adjusted, roles added or repositioned, with immediate visibility of headcount and cost impacts ensuring decisions were made with full transparency of their financial and structural implications.

As Sitara Kurian-Patel, Management Consultant at Berkeley, told us, “ Working directly within a live modelling environment enabled significantly higher-quality design by making structures tangible and interactive; it brought stakeholders into a shared space, allowed them to see and test designs in real time, and created alignment through active participation rather than retrospective review”.

This collaborative approach also strengthened governance. With structure and cost data centralised, Berkeley could demonstrate progress to senior stakeholders directly, and generate key metrics efficiently.

“At the click of a button, we could show senior client stakeholders including the COO, CTO and CFO how the designs were shaping up directly in Orgvue, along with the key stats and insights, instead of relying on offline spreadsheets and creating dashboards overnight” – Sitara tells us.

Live modelling reduced rework between functions, cost visibility ensured financial targets remained central to discussion, and executive reporting moved from reactive consolidation to structured oversight.

By consolidating organisational data, cost, and future-state design in one environment, Berkeley was able to coordinate structural decisions across multiple functions while staying aligned to financial targets and agreed design principles.

Live modelling replaced static proposals. Cost impact was visible during design discussions. Executive reporting moved from manual consolidation to structured oversight.

The result was not just a new structure, but a controlled way of designing it.